Saturday, 15 June 2013

The last day of Offf Barcelona 2013, was another great line up of speakers starting from 10.30am to 9.30pm. There always seems trends of inspiration and personal messages from each artist. Most were about doing what you love,following your passions to make it work, making mistakes and learning from them, start working on personal projects and experimenting in your downtime when freelancing, as the amount of stories from speakers saying that it caught a major clients eye.

There is so much content to take away from Offf for design inspiration. Not just as a conference talk, but as a design event and a peek into Barcelona's creative industry. There's boutique design market in the foyer of book shops, artwork from speakers, tshirts, furniture. Video management company Nimia set up a super slow mo camera to capture segments of the attendees and speakers. Learning program associated with the festival Atelier offer annual courses and workshops for creating the Offf festival branding and titles etc.

There's not enough space to talk about all artists - but check more photos on the last day of other speakers Sarah Blake, Fantasy Interactive, Hydro74, Laura Meseguer and 3D digital artist Rik Oostenbroek.

Sougwan
On half of the VJ, projection and installation artist speaking at Offf - New York / living in stockholm artist Sougan talked us through her process of combing all these styles. Her hand drawn illustration skills (getting away from screen overdose) influencing digital media. Starting from a music background working for Ghostly International to the fine arts degree her work is about visualizing music. Learning tones, is like learning karate from the karate kid, repetition. She uses the element of time in her illustrations (the eye following lines) to coding to 3d installations. For projection mapping fiends make sure you check out Mapping festival in Geneve.

Plenty
The well known Argentinian guys from Buenos Aires, talked through two projects - AXN / Criminal Minds and Nickolodean Idents. Instead of talk about it, I'll just show you there awesome work.

From Form
This humble little studio in Amsterdam is one guy and one girl taking on awesome title design projects. Their popularity started from creating 'the history of the title sequence'. They showed the premiere screening of the main titles for Offf 2013 created by From Form and Part of something. Mr Emilton's Cabinet of Curiosities. An original narrative script to the titles and sound design by Jochin Mader. It was a very lovely 7 mins. Massive applause from the audience - To show the titles for the first time to a live audience then speak about them afterwards takes guts. They dove deep into behind the scenes of their process and crazily enough they made the WHOLE set of the video in their studio, crazy. Picking up old furniture from parents and buying the rest on Ebay - I hope they had a budget for it!I love this kind of dedication to creating great piece of title design.

Brosmind
Beatboxing, jumping around in furry suits, looking like a bloodhound gang video clip... these brothers returned again from last years festival to put on a good closing presentation. They talked only about personal projects of their fun illustrative style and work methods (and where their book was located at the festival so we could buy it.) The random shit they make is fresh, original and inspirational. Very cool interactive festival titles idea done with Home De Caramel

Friday, 14 June 2013

Here is a selection of day two speakers at Offf festival. There was still no wifi! For all photos and more speakers check out HERE.

David O'reily.
David talked to us about universal thesis of creativity and showed us very early the formula for the perfect idea. He loved taking screen grabs of his 3d renders fucking up, and then using these aesthetics from the program itself for inspiration on his animation. He talked through his wacky projects of 'RGB XYZ' the internet sensation 'octocat' & 'The External World' (Could download from his website fir free the rigs and characters. Often made into online orgies) to his work with the cartoon network show 'Adventure time' and the Mclaren Workshop App.

N9ve
Motion graphics studio of three guys talked emotionally about their design journey from starting with no clients and little money 'just two guys with two lazy laptops' to starting a studio. They showed us their earlier work of animated alphabets until they realized it had been done and they were just messing around with other peoples work. From their stop motion & animation style stamp, they have produced elegant motion graphics for clients. Cool projects - Correos Ecatd, White pages and in their downtime they are UI designers creating 'messageme.com' Coming Soon. N9ve left with this message "for those who believe - anything is possible."

Cake
Just to confirm for everyone, Cake are not a team of chefs (even though they do like eating) they are a director and animation boutique. They talked about the importance of a balanced lifestyle and their first studio branding of Los Muertos (Dead people) that did not work. Some sweet projects 'A box for rob' title sequence 'a liars autobiography' 'Pausefest' behind the scenes. MTV design package. And a walk through of doing the Offf festival design bumpers. Everybody loves cake!

Unit9
This was the first interactive design talk I caught at the festival with Robert from Berlin. He talked through responsive web pages and the now trend of one way scrolling websites are not using the potential. Talked through his rewarding projects using interactive web and apps. Project 'How many slaves work for you' was a highlight and beautifully designed. Talked about bring 3d designs from Maya into OpenGL. Another good app for the community was the Lifesaver app, which save lives. Directors Reel Here.

Sarosky
While their is an abundance of male directors and motion graphic artists around, Sarosky talked directly to woman in the industry and questioned why their are not more female directors like herself. There needs to be a girl rising.Her story from RIT to Digital Kitchen to Superfad to Sarosky in her loved Chicago city. With a taste for film title design myself, she showed her pitch storyboards and talked about client relations. Shameless television titles & The Killing (great deliverables of psd kits, Ai kits for AMC key art) which she showed crazy compositing/VFX of rain & sky as the initial shoot didn't work out due to sun!

James White
A very energetic speaker from Canada, Novia Scotia, James was expressing his massive passion for the illustrative work, client or no client - it did not matter to him. Speed talker with 256 slides to power through, was a very entertaining presentation. Talked through the highs and lows of his career, and lessons to be learnt. Akzidenz-Grotesk is not fucking Arial or Helvetica. With his geeky passion for pop culture he inspires to one day make a 'Masters Of The Universe' poster. He talked through favorite project with the client for Farcry3 Blood Dragon - "James, don't freak out - but we need to have a dinosaur shooting lasers out of its eyes in the background" You never know where your work will turn up, so it's important to push it out there to the world. Be fearless. As a lot of his jobs he had sourced through twitter.

Gmunk
Gmunk's work puts the G into Gui design. This was the last presentation of the day and a highlight. The amount of detail in his work is enough to stare at (rewind video scroller) for hours. Jason raced through his projects from Tron, Oblivion with humorous bumpers and his dark sense of humor. Talked about his different directions after working full time on Tron for a year with blue and orange holograms. He loves the fabric of data shaping form. Also states the importance of referencing for research as a Director. To keep up with his techy shit and inspiration check out his up coming company Bot & Dolly. or for reels and info on UI design Gmunk on TYP3D.